SMART...in a stupid world
I could read newspapers on my fourth birthday. I was one of the youngest
freshmen in MIT's class of 1946 at age 16. I always found school boring
and dropped out at the first opportunity and went into the Navy near the
end of WWII after my first fling at the jazz life.
At first it was hard to realize that SMART qualified as a disability. I
knew that my fellows treated me with a strange mixture of respect,
disdain, and hostility. A similar thing happened when I was a bicycle
messenger at an army quartermaster depot and zipped through a six hour
featherbed assignment in 45 minutes - "don't do that, you'll spoil it
for the rest of us." I heard that in the war plant where I thought we
should all be doing our best to defeat Hitler but the union steward AND
the shift manager told me to slow down.
Our prejudices aren't confined to those we deem inferior, we also
express bigotry against those who outperform us. We are infected with a
disease whose symptoms include a lust for exclusivity. Even being elite
qualifies one for ostracism but if we remember that the chairman of the
board also fucks up a lot, we might have a healthier chance to move
towards whatever it is we're moving towards.
SMART is a peculiar thing because it depends on some fairly arbitrary
norms. A visiting Martian might not think the ability to do crossword
puzzles in ink was as significant as skill at arcade games. Mental tests
are designed by people who belong to an elite group and have tried to
get in a position that their tests are called "objective."
In the uproar over "preferential hiring" the "angry white male" who
scored higher on some "aptitude" test thinks that he somehow proved he
was better qualified because the test was biased in his favor. IQ tests
measure something, they just don't measure "intelligence" - whatever
that is.